One more for Eight Belles

One more thing from the article about horse-racing brutality. The article said of the trainer of Eight Belles:

He also refused to concede the point that horse racing is an extremely dangerous sport, saying that these types of injuries occur in any sport.

Except the most important thing of all: the participants in other sports are all human, and they all have a choice about whether they can play.

nasty reporting from the Washington Post

In an article summarizing the Kentucky Derby results:

For [trainer Richard] Dutrow, the victory by Big Brown confirmed everything he and jockey Kent Desormeaux believed about their horse. Dutrow, a top New York-based trainer with a checkered history of personal drug use and drug violations in his horses, had insisted no horse in the field had shown the ability to beat Big Brown. He had appeared startlingly boastful of the first horse he would ever run in the Kentucky Derby.

The whole paragraph is obnoxious, with the drug use comment being the cheapest shot in a salvo of cheap shots. I never even heard of Richard Dutrow until yesterday; he could be Stalin for all I know (given he forces horses into danger daily, he's not exactly a nice guy). It's not relevant. It's just plain mean.